2011

The past 6 months have been pretty exciting and eventful for Team Helicopters, so I figured it was time that we gave a little status update.  We’ve not been particularly good at this blog thing, so consider this our New Year’s resolution to try and be a little more proactive in this regard. 

We had intended to release ‘Slow Leak at the Seam’ on January 11th, but other ‘bigger’ life events (wedding, new baby boy, fatherhood, and family) have been dividing our time into smaller and smaller increments.  This is not a complaint in any way, just an explanation as to why (in part) we have delayed this release. 

After setting this release date, we also realized that this left no time for us to actually promote the release, which would be a real shame, considering all of the work we put into it, and (we think) the strength of the material.  As I’m sure you, good reader, are aware, having a release without promotion is akin to breaking a world record alone in your basement; if no one ever sees/hears it, then it didn’t really happen.   

So we’re working on that now.  The album is at about 95%, we have a really fantastic video director, Josh Pabst, who’s been working on a video for the first single from the album, and we’ve been meeting/talking with different promotional channels to determine what our ‘plan’ is for the record. 

In the meantime, we went through our archives, and released ‘Not Diamonds But Diamonds’ on Tuesday.  This is our ’Dead Letter Office’ (REM album).  It’s all of the stuff that we were fond enough of to want to share, but for whatever reason, it didn’t fit with the current release, wasn’t completely realized, or was really good but wasn’t ‘helicopters’.   The songs span helicopters’ entire existence from 2005 to the present, with outtakes and b-sides from each album, including the upcoming release. 

You can download all 18 NDBD tracks here for free:  http://helicopters.bandcamp.com

So that’s where we’re at.  We will spend the next few months completing ‘SLATS’, figuring out how to make a compelling live perfomance out of a quite complicated record, and enjoying all of the other wonderful things that life brings.

Thanks for your support, your patience, and your interest.  We will still be making songs even if no one ever hears them, but it’s more fun when they do.

All the best for 2011,

bri